One minute, 11-year-old Carmen is watching her hippy mum put curlers in for the first time, the next she is being dragged with her sister through LA airport with her mother muttering about 'the patriarchy' under breath. The three of them board a plane that takes them to Peru, next door to the Chile from which the family had fled after Pinochet's coup. Eight days after landing in Lima, and still perplexed by their mother's disguises and lies, they're off again, on a bus bound they know not where. They are then to spend most of the next decade, the 1980s, moving from dictatorship to dictatorship, evading capture, torture and peril at every turn. It is no way to spend your teenage years, until, overnight, it becomes the way Carmen herself chooses - She writes: 'It is not my intention to present myself as a hero or a martyr. On the contrary, Something Fierce is the story of a resistance member living in fear. Fear that my political convictions would not be strong enough to keep myself committed to a cause that I believed in but which clashed with my other desires: to live a normalA" life, to sleep a full night's sleep, to dance and laugh and talk nonsense without my radar up, without having to watch every word, every choice I make.'

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Biografía del autor

CARMEN AGUIRRE was taken, aged 11, from her comfortable Canadian exile, by her mother, to Chile, then Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, spending the next 6 years in the safe houses her mother and stepfather ran. At 18, she joined the guerrilla resistance in Pinochet's Chile. Today she again lives in Canada, where she is a celebrated playwright and actress - she was in Quinceanera, a Sundance winner. This is her first book.

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Chilean-Canadian recounts ten years of her nomadic, adventurous, secretive life as the daughter of a revolutionary.24 de febrero de 2012

Por
Julee Rudolf
- Publicado en Amazon.com

Formato: Tapa dura

After the Chilean coup in 1973, Something Fierce author Carmen Aguirre and her family were forced to flee. Due to an agreement between Augusto Pinochet and Pierre Trudeau in which the Canadian Prime Minister (p 6) "agreed to offer asylum to Chilean refugees," the Aguirres became "one of the first Chilean refugee families to arrive" in Canada. Her memoirs begin in June of 1979 with the family, consisting of the then 11-year-old Carmen, her 10-year-old sister Ale, their mother (also named Carmen), and her stepfather, Bob, at LAX. The girls learn they are headed to La Paz, Bolivia, where, in response to the Return Plan, their parents plan to take part in the resistance. While many members of the resistance sent their children off to (p 100) "to live with Cuban families who'd volunteered to raise them or with grandparents somewhere else," "As far as [Ale and Carmen's mother] was concerned, a woman shouldn't have to choose between motherhood and revolution. She wanted both," so she kept her daughters close. Ms. Aguirre's mother proclaims (p 7), "To be in the resistance is a matter of life and death. To say the wrong thing to the wrong person is a matter of life and death," thus the family is forced to live a cautious, dual life, in which they try to fit in and avoid calling attention to themselves. As such, they rub elbows and break bread with both supporters and opponents of the movement.

During the approximately 10-year period covered in her memoirs, from age 11 to 21, the author recounts many of the types of experiences one might expect the average girl to have: interacting with family, friends, boyfriends and acquaintances during an impressionable time, but the play backs show her heightened awareness for differences in the social classes (p 29), "I was sorry that Peru wouldn't be our last stop. I wanted us to join the resistance here so we could help the angry teenagers in the streets and the little boy outside the hotel and the chambermaid whose children were dying of diarrhea and the Indian family who had carried the tables and chairs for the Austrians and this old mule take the streets and squares and mountains and make Peru their own," and understanding of the potential danger, (p 16) "I knew I'd aim a stone at those paramilitaries and miss, and then I'd be tortured with electric shocks and sent to the firing squad..." Resentful of the situation, Carmen sometimes acts out, and engages in rebellious, destructive behaviors. While a lot of its subject matter is serious, Ms. Aguirre's story is not without humor, for example, her mother, shod in platform shoes, saying (p 1), "Firing squad to the woman hater who invented heels," and the author's contention that two different dictionaries (rich and poor) are required in Peru (p 23), `If you looked up the word bathroom in the Poor Peru dictionary, the definition would be: "Just over the hill there." If you looked it up in the Rich Peru dictionary, the definition would read: "Marble room with gold taps and its own servant to keep it sparkling."' Because her mother did such a good job of inculcating her, (p 15) "we didn't believe in charity...We believed in revolution...A classless society is what we were fighting for...," and, (p 32) `Genocide was committed in the name of the Church and progress. That's why we are atheists,"' it should come as no surprise to readers that, at age 18, Ms. Aguirre takes the oath and joins the movement.

Although I appreciated becoming less ignorant about the resistance movement, I found myself thinking about what was going on in my own life through age 21, working to pay my own way through college in order to obtain a degree in a challenging field of study that would allow me to earn a decent wage upon graduation, that is, heading towards towards capitalism. Something Fierce, the Canada Reads selection for 2012, is an important, informative, ingenuous coming-of-age story about a girl's experience as a revolutionary's daughter and eventual revolutionary. Also good: 11 Years in Soviet Prison Camps by Elinor Lipper, Even Silence Has an End by Ingrid Betancourt and Red Azalea by Anchee Min.

Darkly comic? That's the description of the book given by, I think, the publisher. Yes, there are some funny parts. Life without humor is sort of like life without breathing, and the more extreme the conditions, the more likely some humor will erupt. But humor is not the main point of Something Fierce. This is a book of passionate anger against violent crimes and the will to give everything to stop them. What makes the book so compelling is that our protagonist is so young and so vulnerable.

Carmen Aguirre, along with her mother, step-father, and sister, led a double life, first as a child of revolutionaries, and later as a revolutionary herself, from the time she was eleven years old. The story she reveals in this memoir is one that every thoughtful person should read, because we know so little of what the resistance and the sacrifice of Latin Americans has been in their quest over the last century to gain independence from a succession of imperial forces, the latest and longest being the United States of America with its commercial dominance.

Curiously, we see that the blatant inhumanity of Latin American leaders trained by the School of the Americas (USA) in techniques of ruthless oppression, destruction and torture has persuaded many citizens of those countries to turn against extreme capitalism, especially in its newest form, "The New Economic Order," or neo-liberalism. Of great importance to the story is that the local dictators in these countries never could have succeeded in creating such nightmarish conditions for the people without the military and financial aid of the USA.

This memoir has the suspense and terror of a thriller and yet the wonderful human intensity of a young girl with normal longings and aspirations that she somehow has to eke out of the life she has taken on. Few young people have the ability or the desire to make the kind of total commitment that was necessary for exiled Chileans in their effort to reclaim their country from one of recent history's most evil men, Augusto Pinochet. But Ms. Aguirre did it. Not infallibly but at great cost and with great courage.

Read this book. Ponder what this tale means to us in our own lives wherever we are. We live in a time where dissent and human rights are being eroded in the interest of "national securities." No society or nation or civilization is exempt from the possibility that an oppression similar to what happened in Latin American countries can be imposed through mass hysteria and the manipulation of fear. When that happens, the story will be more than a thriller. It will be a horror story that at the least rivals those of the Holocaust.

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Facinating29 de abril de 2013

Por
Brigette Furlonger
- Publicado en Amazon.com

Formato: Versión Kindle
Compra verificada

Although this book was a facinating read, I was disappointed by the end. Throughout the book, Carmen discribes her relationship with family. Unfortunately, she doesn't continue with her relationship with her parents. I felt like I was hanging, wondering what had happened between Carmen and her mother in particular. I would have liked a final chapter describing her closest relationships and what happened to those people. There were too many unanswered questions for me.

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Enthralling3 de octubre de 2012

Por
Joe Reader
- Publicado en Amazon.com

Formato: Versión Kindle
Compra verificada

New insight into a world I did not have a whole bunch of knowledge, revealed itself in this book. Although it did not cover a topic I embrace, the life of the children involved in this dishevelled journey was worth the read .

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The Chilean Resistance from the Inside31 de enero de 2013

Por
Candon
- Publicado en Amazon.com

Formato: Tapa blanda
Compra verificada

This first-hand story of growing up in the Chilean resistance after the Pinochet coup is riveting and revealing. It is utterly unlike anything I have read before, political without becoming polemical, deeply personal but movingly human. There is no room here for the cynicism or distancing prevalent in too many autobiographies and first-person accounts of events. This is raw, moving and almost excruciatingly honest. No wonder it won last year's Canada Reads award. Read this not only to better understand the savagery of the CIA-backed Pinochet coup and its aftermath,but to also understand the motivation, dedication and sacrifices of those committed to combating tyranny not only in Chile, but in nations around the globe.